The ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, with
the financial and technical assistance of the German Federal
Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, through GTZ,
introduced an environmentally friendly stove that also saves
biomass by more than 50 percent, he said.

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He said that according to the World Health Organization,
46,000 women and children in Bangladesh die each year, while
millions more suffer from respiratory, tuberculosis and
cardiovascular diseases and lung cancer due to the "killer in
the kitchen."

"Biomass is also becoming increasingly scarce and costly,
putting pressure on the farmers to use more chemical fertilizer
instead of bio-fertilizer," said Khaleq Uzzaman, senior adviser
of Sustainable Energy for Development (SED).

The SED launched a countrywide program to popularize the
improved cooking stoves developed by the state-run Bangladesh
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and later
modified by the GTZ.

Khaleq said so far 35,000 stoves have been sold and
installed across the country and now up to 10,000 were being
built every month.

"Our aim is to build 1 million stoves over the next three
years," he said, and hoped to have one in every rural
Bangladeshi home by the end of 2018.

Currently, only 6 percent of the population has access to
natural gas, primarily in urban areas, he told reporters.

($1=68.58 taka)

(Reporting by Serajul Islam Quadir; Writing by Anis Ahmed,
editing by Will Waterman)